Graphics and Design Tip  Subscribe to our feed!

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Video Transcript: In today’s visibility tip we’re going to talk a little bit about your site’s graphics and design. Graphics can be the gateway to a great site experience, or they can stop your visitors in their tracks faster than a kidney punch. Don’t box out your visitors with graphics.

Compress your graphics when possible

Most graphics programs like Fireworks and Adobe have easy to use, built in features for downsizing or compressing your graphics. You’d be surprised how many times you can knock the file size of your graphic by 20-30%. The bottom line is, smaller graphics load faster than larger ones and faster loading means your visitors spend their time converting instead of waiting.

It’s great to have larger, more detailed images available to your visitors, but you are generally better off to let them make an extra click to reach those images. You want your landing pages to always load as quickly as possible. Unless you want that potential customer to bail out while waiting for an 800k image, optimize those images.

Avoid splash or intro pages

Sure you can make a really cool flashy intro page for your site. But, why? No one has made useless, no-value, time-wasting splash pages for business-focused websites since the time when discussions about the President involved interns, blue dresses, and Ken Starr. In terms of attention span, most Web surfers are pretty much neck and neck with ferrets on a double espresso kick. They aren’t going to sit there and wait for your dog and pony show to load before they buy whatever it is you’re selling. Get them where they want to go with as few clicks, hitches, delays and pauses as you possibly can. Once you get them there, you can certainly present them with the option to view your plunge into digital self-expression… but it should never be a pre-requisite to them converting into a customer.

Always use ALT text

Search engines don’t see pictures- no matter how cool they are. As such, all images on your site should have accompanying ALT text. Title tags are great too, for keywords and helping to theme your pages. But at the very minimum you should have an ALT tag on your images to explain to the search engine spiders what the image is about.

Think about compatibility

Sometimes your designer will come to you and show you some new redesign or retooling of your site and it will flat out knock your socks off. It’ll be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen online and you’ve never seen it anywhere else. Your first inclination might be to say “I love it! Get it online ASAP. However, what that designer didn’t tell you is that this part, or that part or anything below ‘here’ will actually only display for users using version whatever of browser beta 3.6 etc.

In other words, it isn’t going to work for some people. As a matter of fact, it may not work for most people… but yeah, it’s cool. As such, you should always ask of your developers/designers, and keep it in mind if you do it all yourself Does this get in the visitor’s way? You can’t be concerned with designing stuff today to look cool on the 2042 edition of Firefox.

Don’t over Flash

Don’t get me wrong. I love Flash. Flash is great. You can do all kinds of neat things in Flash. You can watch videos, play games, build applications - -the possibilities are limitless. The problem is, Search engine spiders don’t understand Flash. If all of the good content of your site is inside a Flash file, the search engine spiders will see exactly none of it. You may as well have spent that design money on the slots in Vegas. Therefore, if there isn’t anything on your page except for a little header information and a Flash file… guess what? That’s right, they aren’t going to see it. As such, I would advise anyone to be judicious in their use of Flash. You have to have some way of letting the search engine spiders see the content of your site and cloaking is not the solution. Cloaking makes people like Matt Cutts at Google shake his head just before de-listing your website. That’s a great way to get yourself in a really bad spot. The better solution is just to simply make sure there’s always enough real live text on your page to let the spiders know what it’s about.

So, to review:
-Compress your graphics when possible - Faster load times means converting visitors to customers faster.
-Avoid splash or intro pages - Most people search with a purpose, don’t delay them
-Always use ALT text - Let the spiders know what your cool graphics are
-Think about compatibility - Always design for the greatest number of users
-Don’t over Flash - Spiders can’t see it and there are even some version compatibility issues.

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